Family food culture, local food memories, workers’ table stories, and personal relationships with food.
An Anhui family travelled far into the Hunan countryside to open a mooncake factory. The child grew up beside the conveyor belt through summer holidays, until the factory shut, the fields all became sheds, and the bicycle on the river embankment rode ever further away.
Jinzi grows heirloom yellow garden peas using biodynamic farming on mountains above 3,000 metres in Xiaojin County, Aba Prefecture. Shipping lasts only about two weeks a year; this year, three jin of pods finally reached the dining buddies’ table.
Once small workshops for frying pork rind were banned, tofu makers swapped black oil they could skim clean for chemical defoamers—and the caregiver has since refused all soya products. One “people-first” crackdown has severed not just farm livelihoods but trust at the dinner table.
At Pengcheng Natural Farm in Yinlin Village, Conghua—pruning lychee branches, leaving grass to nourish the soil, reduced tillage and less fertilising—these everyday labours of Natural Farming were four gifts of letting go, simplicity, relaxation and acceptance from an ecological agriculture internship.
At Meet Farm in Meishan, Chen Ying replaces pesticides and chemical fertilisers with rice-duck pest control and kitchen-waste composting. Across forty mu, she grows and raises everything herself – the only food that needs to be bought in is salt.
Stir-frying spans only a few centuries; iron woks and refined oil are both recent arrivals. The real excess is high-temperature refined oil, not natural fats in nuts and the like. Skipping stir-frying is much like barefoot running: a way of living that returns to our evolutionary instincts.
In Yulin, Chengdu, Xia Lili has set up a community small dining table with traceable, farm-direct ingredients, giving a group long reliant on takeaway a reason to pick up their rice bowls again. Some have regained their appetite; others, their motivation to get up on time.
In Japanese, “soba” and “beside me” are homophones — housewarming noodles for neighbours, toshikoshi soba on Ōmisoka, enduring customs. In Nagano, the heart of soba country, from Jōmon-era famine porridge to Edo peddlers’ cries, this bowl’s journey hides in the everyday.
Xia Lili cooks for her meal companions in Yulin, Chengdu – a bowl of pa pa cai boiled in plain water, no oil, no salt, ten grains cooked into one pot of rice – bringing farmer friends, bodies and the land back to the same table.
Li Ruijun, a wild-mushroom researcher, was poisoned by overeating broom blossoms last year. Even the termite mushroom, long thought to grow only on termite nests, has been trialled for cultivation — four people in ecology and natural history chat about the safety, authenticity and nature education of foraged food.
